Nasir Gebelli used an Apple II and its mini assembler to make all his games, including the Famicom games Rad Racer, 3D Worldrunner and Final Fantasy. Yes, the mini assembler and nothing else. He was a legend. He didn't even know how a RPG game worked when he started programming Final Fantasy!

I'd like to have your sources for this statement. I'm quite interested in Square's early days.

Quote:

And it showed.

What exactly do you mean by this statement ? I have several suspictions on my side but I'd just like to confirm that yours are the same as mine.

Nasir Gebelli used an Apple II and its mini assembler to make all his games, including the Famicom games Rad Racer, 3D Worldrunner and Final Fantasy. Yes, the mini assembler and nothing else. He was a legend. He didn't even know how a RPG game worked when he started programming Final Fantasy!

I'd like to have your sources for this statement. I'm quite interested in Square's early days.

Quote:

And it showed.

What exactly do you mean by this statement ? I have several suspictions on my side but I'd just like to confirm that yours are the same as mine.

So the question's been asked about what tools commercial developers used, but how about the homebrew scene? What did people use before nesasm and friends came around, if anything?

For the CopyNES plugin, Kevtris apparently used the Telemark Assembler, which was a customizable assembler. The big thing with this assembler was that all the opcodes would come from an external table, so it could be used for different CPUs. This is the table used for the 6502 code in CopyNES' plugins: TASM65.TAB

Writing a very simpler assembler is not that big a task though, maybe a few hours of work? Some people might have just wrote their own as needed. Here's a particularly terse 6502 assembler written in Forth (found during a discussion of Forth in another thread here): forum.6502.org thread

There are one or two people around here who seem to prefer using hex editors and memorizing opcode values directly, too, though it kinda boggles me that anyone wants to work that way.

Didn't MS-DOS used to come with a very rudimentary command line x86 assembler tool? I seem to recall using it to create a very tiny example .COM file years ago... (it had sort of "immediate" entry, didn't process an external file)

Last edited by rainwarrior on Sat Mar 25, 2017 2:23 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Didn't MS-DOS used to come with a very rudimentary command line x86 assembler tool? I seem to recall using it to create a very tiny example .COM file years ago... (it had sort of "immediate" entry, didn't process an external file)

Ah, TASM! Sega 8-bit devs also used that before WLA came around. If there was a more modern assembler like that, I'd use it for pretty much everything. (Well, excluding the potential of ca65 or python to just have a macro pack full of assembler instructions ).

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